Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all ci...vil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil... hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »